There are many types of archives. Some may exist for historical purposes. For example, over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, documents may be kept to show a historical view of that person or organization. Some may be put in place by corporations or enterprises alike for compliance reasons. For example, in the United States, an employer is required to preserve for at least three years payroll records, collective bargaining agreements, sales and purchase records, etc.; the Internal Revenue Service requires all records of employment taxes be kept for at least four years; and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) requires a 6-year retention period for protected health information (PHI) such as patients' medical records and other personal health information. Certain types of information, e.g., DNA work product, may be required to be preserved for even longer lengths of time, e.g., 99 years or more.
Whatever the reason is for preserving such documents, they are traditionally assessed, collected, organized, and preserved by information professionals called archivists. The traditional document preservation process may entail reducing documents deemed worthy of long-term preservation and printing them onto microforms. Microforms can be films or paper that contain microreproductions (e.g., using microphotography or any suitable standard reproduction techniques known to those skilled in the art) of documents. Microform images are commonly reduced to about one twenty-fifth of the original document size. For special purposes, greater optical reductions may be used.
Microforms can have different physical formats. For instance, microform images can be printed on microfilm (mounted on reels) or microfiche (flat sheets). The term “film” generally refers to a thin translucent strip or sheet of cellulose coated with a light-sensitive emulsion, used in a camera to take still pictures or photographs. The term “microfilm” generally refers to a film suitable for bearing a miniature photographic copy or a miniaturized reproduction of printed or other graphic matter, usually of a document, newspaper, or book pages, etc., made for a library, archive, or the like. The term “microfiche” generally refers to a flat sheet of microfilm in a form suitable for filing printed or graphic matter, typically measuring 4 by 6 inches, and containing microreproductions, in a grid pattern. These archival media can be cataloged and stored in archival facilities. Archivists may maintain control over and provide access to the archival media.
A document that has been through this traditional document preservation (analog archiving) process has a physical representation (e.g., on a piece of film) that has a measurable physical quality (e.g., the piece of film is 4 by 6 inches). The digital document preservation (digital archiving) process commonly used in today's electronic environments is entirely different from the analog archiving process described above.
In practice, a digital archiving process can be viewed as a records management process that ensures the protection, maintenance, and accessibility of certain documents and that begins from the moment a document is created and ends with the document being destroyed or preserved. To this end, a records management system is usually responsible for maintaining information on the creation and management of electronic archives in accordance with applicable regulations, policies, rules, and/or laws. Such a records management system can be an essential part of a content management system, because certain managed content may need to be preserved for compliance reasons, as discussed above.
A digital archiving system such as a records management system described above may have many components, including software tools for creating and classifying records, software tools for managing security and confidentiality policies applicable to the records, and long-term storage media for storing the records electronically. However, when compared with the long-term storage media used in an analog archiving system (e.g., microfilms), the long-term storage media used in a digital archiving system (e.g., optical discs, hard drives, tapes, etc., collectively referred to as digital data storage media) have a significantly shorter lifespan. For example, with appropriate storage conditions, preservation standard microfilms have a life expectancy of 500 years. By contrast, digital data storage media generally have a practical life expectancy between 2 to 5 years and published life expectancies of 10, 25, and up to 30 years. As such, relative to an analog archiving system, a digital archiving system may need to move a huge amount of data very frequently.
Another issue relates to the cost of keeping digital data storage media up to date. Each time when an old digital archiving system becomes out of date (e.g., system obsolete) and/or when an old digital data storage medium expires (e.g., software obsolete, format obsolete, or end of life), a massive amount of electronic documents may need to be migrated to a new digital archiving system or a new digital data storage medium. Compared to analog data storage media, digital data storage media can be very expensive and hence the cost of preserving documents on digital data storage media can be very high relative to the cost of preserving documents on analog data storage media.
Yet another issue relates to the need to verify and ensure that each document (in the massive amount of documents that need to be migrated) has not been modified during migration. Skilled artisans appreciate that migration of a document from one electronic data storage device to another may unavoidably involve data conversion of some sort. Furthermore, certain information such as timestamp may be automatically added to the document. Unlike analog archiving systems, such alterations are usually not visible to and/or not easily discoverable by human users.
An analog archiving system stores an actual image of the original data, so it is easy to view and requires no software to decode the data stored thereon. The archived information cannot be modified and can be read and instantly comprehensible to those who are literate in the language of the archived information. The only equipment needed is a reader machine with a magnifying glass. This eliminates the issue of obsolescence discussed above.
Analog archiving systems, however, are not without drawbacks. For example, reader machines used to view microforms are often difficult to use, requiring users to carefully wind and rewind until they have arrived at the point where the data they are looking for is stored. There is not an automated way to search and retrieve microforms.